NASA Using ROS2

[camp .]

NASA's VIPER is planned for delivery to the Moon in late 2023

 

"NASA's Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover, or VIPER, is a mobile robot that will go to the South Pole of the Moon to get a close-up view of the location and concentration of water ice that could eventually be harvested to sustain human exploration on the Moon, Mars — and beyond. VIPER represents the first resource mapping mission on another celestial body."

 
"Rather than creating only custom code, the rover's flight and ground-based software will make extensive use of open source software, including key components adapted from the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) which is widely used in everything from robot vacuum cleaners to autonomous drones and self-driving cars."
 
VIPER's Mission Operations

https://www.nasa.gov/viper/lunar-operations

 

Enjoy,

Camp

[Ralph Hipps]

"adapted from ROS 2..." 

meaning they're fixing the bugs?    =)

explains the forward motion capability in their rovers...    =)

I'm teasing, obviously.

[camp .]

Well, they are giving themselves two years.  :-)))

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[Ralph Hipps]

plus they can send updates while it's in flight...     =)

Ralph

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[mark...@acm.org]

I'm a software developer on the NASA VIPER mission. I'd be glad to answer questions, as I can, about the mission. It may be a bit disappointing for HBR, though, in that it is not an autonomous mission. Rather, to reduce cost, it's kind of a drive-by-wire mission. Also, there's no ROS on the rover, just on the ground.

VIPER mission overview:

- Land on the lunar south pole near permanently shadowed regions.

- Prospect for water and other volatiles.

- Characterize presence of volatiles with respect to geology to aid in future human landing missions.

- VIPER will search for both subsurface volatiles, not necessarily in permanently shadowed regions, and also surface volatiles in permanently shadowed regions.

- Launch date: late 2023

VIPER rover:

- Designed to be low-cost, it uses a real-time operating system with flight software based on NASA's Core Flight Software (cFS - https://github.com/nasa/cfs).

- Autonomy on the rover is limited to driving, the equivalent of a move_base/goal: drive to this new pose.

- There is no on-board obstacle avoidance. Instead, drivers must be sure the path is clear to the new pose.

- Nominal speed of the rover is 0.1 m/s. Max speed is about 0.2 m/s. This is much faster than the Mars NASA rovers (but they're more autonomous). Speed of terrain shadow movement is about 0.05 m/s at times, so rover must have a total speed-made-good above that speed to keep in the sun (so as not to die).

- Solar panels on three sides. (Not on the top, since the Sun is at a low angle on the pole.)

- Four wheels (not six, like the JPL Mars rovers). All four wheels are turnable. There's a special "swimming mode" – which we hope not to need – where the rover moves by moving the wheels kind of like a breast stroke, to enable movement in deep sand like what killed the Spirit rover on Mars.

VIPER rover instruments:

- Navcam – stereo camera on a mast with a pan-tilt unit.

- Rear camera – also stereo with fixed field of view.

- Four hazard cameras

- IMU

- Wheel motor encoders

- Star tracker – upward looking, to get rover orientation

- Drill, to retrieve subsurface samples (Trident)

- Gas mass spectrometer (MSOLO)

- Near infrared and visible spectrometer (NIRVSS)

- Neutron spectrometer (NSS) – primarily for detecting hydrogen

- Various temperature and power monitors for rover and instrument health

VIPER ground software

- ROS2-based

- Performs visual odometry and stereo depth calculation to refine rover pose and create hazard maps

- Also creates digital elevation models (DEMs) and compares with DEMs from orbital data to further refine positioning

- Also Gazebo-based simulation for mission simulation prior to launch, and also for simulation during flight for planning purposes

- Incoming data from the rover converted to ROS messages: joint states, pose estimate, images (and probably more TBD)

Other ground software

- Telemetry and control software (T&C), the primary mechanism for communication with the rover through the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN), it also communicates back-and-forth to the ROS-based rover ground software.

- Rover driving tool – based on legacy software that was not ROS-based, but communicates with both ROS and the T&C system

- Planning tools, not ROS-based

- Map server, for map layers

- NASA OpenMCT software (https://github.com/nasa/openmct/), a web-based system for telemetry display used for mission monitoring and science users

- Some specialized ground science systems for some instruments

Anyway, that's a brief overview. Some more info:

- NASA VIPER mission page: https://www.nasa.gov/viper/overview

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIPER_(rover) (Note: Has some misleading info. Rover is *not* built by Astrobotic, but the commercial lander is.)

- https://spacenews.com/astrobotic-wins-nasa-contract-to-deliver-viper-lunar-rover/

Mark

[Michael Wimble]

I’d be also interested in pointers to NASA software that you think we should possibly explore for our home autonomous robots. 

On Feb 15, 2021, at 10:04 AM, mark...@acm.org <mark...@acm.org> wrote:



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[camp .]

> It may be a bit disappointing for HBR, though, in that it is not an autonomous mission.

 

Not disappointing at all! Glad to learn and know how things work and excited to know someone on the list is a software developer on the mission! Please keep us posted!

 
Thanks,
Camp

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/hbrobotics/01523e5c-9b62-4b6b-97cc-13e13ca7b033n%40googlegroups.com

.

[Charles de Montaigu]

Awsome Info. Mark.

All of the above + interested in any deep dive on ROS2 Gazebo/plugin integration and/or Simulation of the four wheel telecom and msg& control in general. Any talks planned ?

Thanks

Chaz

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[mark...@acm.org]

Misspoke about the autonomy a bit:

I wrote:

> Autonomy on the rover is limited to driving, the equivalent of a move_base/goal: drive to this new pose.

Well, the rover also maintains the High Gain Antenna (HGA) orientation and the solar panel angles to the sun while driving. The HGA is on a pan/tilt gimbal. As the rover moves and tips this way and that because of terrain, the HGA continues to point at the Earth ground station. The IMU and Star Tracker are used to get the rover orientation to facilitate HGA tracking.

In addition, the rover will maintain angle toward the sun. Remember that the rover has solar panels on three sides. We try to point one aft corner at the sun at all times. The fact that all four wheels are steerable means we can drive in a crabbing fashion. The onboard software will change wheel directions to keep the Sun angle constant, as much as possible.

Of course, that's still not a ton of autonomy. And once we enter a shadowed region, the sun angle doesn't matter – though we have to watch the power drain at that point. We're normally power positive while in the Sun, even when using all the instruments. Note also that we lose communication with the Earth for two weeks at a time. During that time we have to park the rover where it won't be shadowed for more than 18 hours for any one period. Kind of like the Mars MER rovers had to park on a south facing slope for the Martian winter. Curiosity and Perseverance (the newest Mars rover landing this week) have onboard radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs), not solar panels.